I recently reviewed a 2010 Ted Talk by Sir Ken Robinson where he argues for change in education. He warns us against the industrialisation, systematisation and standardisation of education – how this linear, ‘one size fits all’ treatment of education stifles the organic nature of learning. Are we creating a ‘fast food’ standardisation mentality with e-learning courseware? think we sometimes are. My position on this is captured in my blog post How we think about learning influences our e-learning practice. Social media for learning soft skills and tasks. MORE >>

Question from a client: We’re rolling out workshops about a new people development process. We want to use e-learning to reach the people we miss. How should we go about it? Should we use e-learning via the LMS or video on the intranet? This is a good question. Of course the question should be linked directly to purpose, and all modalities should be planned concurrently. Let’s take a look at each modality before looking at how my client’s question relates to learning strategy. Workshop. The main loses are: The opportunity to ask the facilitator questions. Learning courseware. MORE >>

A number of years ago I was impressed by the writing of Stephen Kemmis , in particular his 2004 article Five traditions in the study of practice. Kemmis was synthesising work by Jürgen Habermas (1987) Lifeworld and System. What I got from the article are the following concepts. And they make sense to me from a pragmatic and real perspective of technology user adoption, and what happens when implementing technology, such as e-learning and learning management systems (LMS), into organisations. Organisations as a social construct. Social constructs are organic. They change, adapt and evolve. MORE >>

A couple of weeks ago I responded to some questions by clients on learning management systems. LMS frustrations continue, and so I feel compelled to write some more. Yesterday I was listening to the podcast Duct Tape Marketing , episode entitled If you still think the customer is king (Nov 16, 2011). John Jantsch was interviewing Aaron Shapiro. The argument was that users are the new decision makers. There was a brief mention of technology lifecycles and ERP systems. The comments rang true for Learning Management Systems. Design and functionality options are always evolving. MORE >>

I was recently asked to define social media. At this time I define it as: Content expressed as thoughts, experience, expertise, opinions…created in text, multimedia, pictures…and shared by individuals for different reasons. It is mediated by technology platforms whose functionality determines the distribution, retrievability and useability of the content. Okay, so the simple difference between the two definitions is social media = content, social learning = learning through exchange. spend a lot of time using social media, and I learn a lot by interacting with it. MORE >>